TCS Wins €10m Auto-Enrolment Pension Contract

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TCS wins €10m auto-enrolment pension contract - Business Plus

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has won the tender for the government's pension auto-enrolment scheme following a public procurement process.
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Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has won the tender for the government's pension auto-enrolment scheme following a public procurement process.

TCS was awarded the 10-year contract, reported to be worth €10m, following the passing of the landmark Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System Bill, pending presidential approval.

The Indian-headquartered company has a global delivery centre based in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal and currently provides pension administration, cyber security and IT support. The group also administers the UK's equivalent auto-enrolment scheme, NEST, with c.13m participants.
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MugsGame said:
10 years to implement, more like.

A highly complex project, particularly when Revenue won't be the Dept. routing the money.
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I know TCS actually run loads of pensions in the UK (I believe Aviva have outsourced their IT and possibly customer service to them), so it shouldn't be too hard for them. Do they also have the UK NEST auto enrollment? The big blocker will be a lack of a fund manager.
 
MugsGame said:
10 years to implement, more like.

A highly complex project, particularly when Revenue won't be the Dept. routing the money.
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Revenue were open to running the collection part. It would just be threatened as another tax to collect and enforce collection of. A few more fields add to their existing PAYE Modernisation system. Now employers will have to deal with two organisations and systems, the second largely duplicating the functions of Revenue.
 
Fortune said:
I know TCS actually run loads of pensions in the UK (I believe Aviva have outsourced their IT and possibly customer service to them), so it shouldn't be too hard for them. Do they also have the UK NEST auto enrollment? The big blocker will be a lack of a fund manager.
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Yes, TCS implemented NEST, but the UK tried to replace them and failed.
 
AndroidMan said:
Yep.. they will make things so unnecessarily complex, non-standard, undocumented, unfathomly unclear and completely unportable.
This guarantees future revenue for them as no other organisation can take over. Ever.
I have first hand experience here.
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FFS, I work in a role with payroll, and between err, PRSI increases , auto enrollment it's been tough , we have so many different systems and processes for our business, it's getting so messy , payroll systems , expenses system, in house systems and all the government systems
 
Seriously though, auto-enrolment contributions are functionally the same as other payroll taxes like USC, PRSI, and income tax and should be collected in exactly the same way.

Not choosing Revenue to collect is a massive unforced error. Completely ignored by our fine journalists and from what I can tell opposition legislators as well.

Auto enrolment going to be like the TV license which is avoided by 35% of the population at about 10x the cost of what Revenue could collect it.

There is going to be a public outcry in 5-10 years when the administrative cost of auto-enrolment is totted up and the small numbers of workers taking advantage of it is revealed.
 
Dr Strangelove said:
Seriously though, auto-enrolment contributions are functionally the same as other payroll taxes like USC, PRSI, and income tax and should be collected in exactly the same way.

Not choosing Revenue to collect is a massive unforced error. Completely ignored by our fine journalists and from what I can tell opposition legislators as well.

Auto enrolment going to be like the TV license which is avoided by 35% of the population at about 10x the cost of what Revenue could collect it.

There is going to be a public outcry in 5-10 years when the administrative cost of auto-enrolment is totted up and the small numbers of workers taking advantage of it is revealed.
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My guess is they decided not to use Revenue so that no-one could point to it as evidence of this just being a new tax.
 
Is there any further insight as to whether this will be in place for Jan 2025

In my company we are trying to "plan" and lay out the updates to internal systems and in house payroll software

However other important projects are coming in so we are trying to allocate staff and resources to both and ifs stretching people and I'm worried we are burning out our developers and support teams working on something now for that could ultimately be delayed

We managed over 1600 SMEs for circa 4000 employees/directors across different tailored payroll and pension platforms(it's all tailored "bespoke software" for different SMEs and it's stressful without more public info

Are TCS going to be ready for Jan?

Any insight would be great if anyone has any information.
 
My opinion - someone in their fourth decade of working in the pensions industry - not a hope of AE being up and running in January 2025. We're nearly into Q4 of 2024 and, while the legislation was passed, the formal rule book has not been published - the manual answering all the questions people have, like "How does AE interact with other forms of pension some people might already have, like Personal Pensions or PRSAs?" and a hundred other questions.

I'm not aware that the fund managers have been selected yet.

I'm not aware that TCS has even started recruiting for all the staff they will need to run the system.

Most tellingly, the person who has been really driving this whole project - Heather Humphreys - has recently said that she might consider postponing the start date, after listening to the concerns of SMEs worried about all the additional costs landing on them from AE and other areas. A lovely bit of politics there, Heather - don't admit that you were never going to be ready anyway and spin it that you're only postponing because people have asked you to.

Throw in a General Election in the meantime. Heather Humphreys might or might not be in the same job afterwards. To her credit, she has made more progress on the AE project than any predecessor in the past 18 years. Will a different minister be as motivated to push it over the finish line?

I genuinely do hope that AE comes into existence eventually, but I doubt that it will be January 2025 or anytime in 2025 at all.
 
cally1990 said:
However other important projects are coming in so we are trying to allocate staff and resources to both and ifs stretching people and I'm worried we are burning out our developers and support teams working on something now for that could ultimately be delayed
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There are no published specifications, so no work can be done.

Collection system could be:

Rehash of the UK's AE API. The name escapes me at the moment, but you can find details of it on line. TCS may well go this route.

Add extra fields to Revenue's PAYE Modernisation system. Treat it as an another tax, with Revenue doing the collecting [and enforcement]. This would be the fastest, cheapest and easiest system to implement. Existing details on Revenue's GitHub site. There appears to be internal politics within the civil service about this option.

Reinvent the wheel: This would cost the most and take the longest. But might allow more money be extracted by TCS from DSP.

Central Management System:
Design and implement a public website and internal management systems.

Distribution System:
Design and implement API interfaces between the 4 pension providers.

3 IT projects which could run in parallel, but have not even started.

I don't see it going live in 2025 and 2026 would be a push. We could still be here in 2030 wondering about AE's start.
 
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Dave Vanian said:
My opinion - someone in their fourth decade of working in the pensions industry - not a hope of AE being up and running in January 2025. We're nearly into Q4 of 2024 and, while the legislation was passed, the formal rule book has not been published - the manual answering all the questions people have, like "How does AE interact with other forms of pension some people might already have, like Personal Pensions or PRSAs?" and a hundred other questions.

I'm not aware that the fund managers have been selected yet.

I'm not aware that TCS has even started recruiting for all the staff they will need to run the system.

Most tellingly, the person who has been really driving this whole project - Heather Humphreys - has recently said that she might consider postponing the start date, after listening to the concerns of SMEs worried about all the additional costs landing on them from AE and other areas. A lovely bit of politics there, Heather - don't admit that you were never going to be ready anyway and spin it that you're only postponing because people have asked you to.

Throw in a General Election in the meantime. Heather Humphreys might or might not be in the same job afterwards. To her credit, she has made more progress on the AE project than any predecessor in the past 18 years. Will a different minister be as motivated to push it over the finish line?

I genuinely do hope that AE comes into existence eventually, but I doubt that it will be January 2025 or anytime in 2025 at all.
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She does spin and PR very well, politics, many advisors to assist in the game of course.
 
According to the Indo TCS are still only the preferred bidder. So in short nothing has progressed for months.

The department said the legislation had now been enacted and Tata Consultancy Services, a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organisation, had been selected as the preferred bidder to administer the system on behalf of the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority (NAERSA).
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